Technical Field
Aspects of the present disclosure relate to an image forming output control device and a non-transitory recording medium storing a program.
Related Art
A printer for a production market used in, e.g., on-demand printing generally includes a combination of a printer-engine main unit and a digital front end (DFE). Such a DFE includes software that performs raster image processing (RIP) (or rendering processing) to generate print output data (hereinafter, referred to as raster data), which is finally referred to at the time of print output in the printer engine side, according to submitted data.
A portable document format (PDF) file is generally used as the submitted data referred in the RIP. The raster data is transferred from the DFE to the print engine and printed out. In the PDF file, for example, image information, drawing commands, text data, and font data are stored as image information in unit of object.
Among such objects, for “Image XObject”, which is an image information object for storing image data, and “Form XObject”, which is a drawing information object for storing a drawing command, it is permitted to refer to the same object from a plurality of pages in the PDF file. In a certain PDF file, image information objects and drawing information objects referred to from a plurality of pages are referred to as reusable objects.
Such a printer may perform so-called variable printing to print both a variation information part in which contents, such as personal information, are changed page by page and a fixed information part in which contents, such as a company logo, are not changed. When variable printing is performed, image data common to each page is stored as Image XObject, and a PDF file can be created in a format referring to Image XObject from an object for defining contents of each page to be printed. Such a configuration can give the effects of reducing the file size of the PDF file and increasing the efficiency of RIP in the DFE.
In addition, a so-called object caching technique is known in which raster data obtained from image data common to a plurality of pages is stored (cached) in a storage medium inside the DFE to speed up the RIP of another page.